Hoary Cress

What’s blooming in the area: Snow that covered everything receded yesterday afternoon. Someone must have had a sale on those propane-powered flame weeders; last weekend, at least four men had them strapped to dollies and were pacing their fields and yards to burn off dead vegetation. Village ditch meetings yesterday and today.

What’s blooming in my yard: Peach, forsythia and hyacinth flowers dead; yesterday icicles were dripping off roses and cholla; Siberian elm seedling unfazed.

Inside: Brazilian bougainvillea, South African aptenia, kalanchoë and rochea weed.

Animal sightings: Rabbit tracks Friday morning; some flies hatched; five head of cattle were brought to graze a fallow field near the village.

Weather: Thursday night rain began before sunset. Then temperatures dropped. Several inches of snow fell on layers of ice that broke branches along the main road and bent pines, Siberian elms and my largest spirea and rose of Sharon. Friday, enough ice melted for the shrubs to spring back, but Saturday morning the thermometer on my front porch read 18 degrees. It’s still March with 12:46 hours of daylight today.

Weekly update: Every spring since I’ve lived here, some short spikes with white heads have bloomed near the post office in April and May. This year, they bolted sooner.

Since I didn’t recognize them from my Michigan childhood, I simply called them the white head. When I looked them up, I discovered hoary cress is new to most people: its most common name is white top.

It’s not that it’s some exotic from the far Altai. Linnaeus knew it as Lepidium draba in 1753, and various people reported it in this country in the nineteenth century. It’s simply that Cardaria draba, as it’s sometimes known, didn’t become a pest until the twentieth century, long after the vocabulary for common plants was formed.

Hoary cress owes its fluorescence to people’s desire to farm the northern great plains. In 1895, a senator from Wyoming, Joseph Carey, sponsored legislation that allowed private companies to build irrigation systems to make public lands more desirable for homesteading. The act defined desert lands as those that couldn’t produce hay, and was particularly popular in Idaho and Wyoming.

A few years later, Congress allowed the agriculture department to send people to collect foreign seeds and prepare them for use in this country. In 1897, Niels Hansen left South Dakota to prospect for alfalfa in Turkestan. His hay seed was so successful in the frigid winter of 1898-1899, that he returned in 1900 to find even better varieties.

Entrepreneurs immediately began offering Turkestan alfalfa seed, often at premium prices. However, the Russian steppes are vast, spanning modern Kazakstan, Uzbekistan, Turkmenistan, Tajikistan and Kyrgyzstan. Importers found the cheapest seed, usually grown in irrigated fields near western ports, while Hansen searched for seed from the most hostile areas, near Lake Baikal in the east.

By 1916, the USDA was telling farmers the seed sold as Turkestan was inferior to American strains. However, since it wasn’t given authority to regulate seed until 1939, all the agronomists could do was tell farmers the ways to recognize poor offerings. The imported stock usually was contaminated with Russian knapweed seeds which were larger than alfalfa and ivory colored. Herbert Groh believes hoary cress hid in those shipments.

Despite looking a bit like a sedum, hoary cress denies our egocentric assumption that the parts of plants we see, flowers and tree canopies, are their raison d’ètre. This mustard lives for its roots. The whitish rhizomes spread under the surface, and whenever they need more nutrients, they send up new shoots, creating dense stands that are unified systems of deep probes seeking water and dense fibrous mats a few inches below ground. Any part that’s broken off by a spade or plow can send up a new stalk to regenerate itself.

The roots, leaves and stems contain sulfurous chemicals that inhibit germination of alfalfa seed, and even prevent growth by its own seedlings. The sticky, mucilaginous, brown seeds develop new colonies at a distance from their self-aggrandizing parents.

The most persistent local plants have been those growing along the sidewalk by the post office and across the road near a concrete foundation. Last year, the grey leaves took over the gravel spread between giant yuccas and a wisteria in the next yard to the north.

The sprouts that broke ground last week may have been killed by this week’s snow and cold, but the roots will survive: they’ve adapted to Finland. Other than herbicides that destroy everything, the only way to kill alfalfa weed is discing the roots some 20" down every few weeks for several years until the seed bank is exhausted. Hoary cress blooms each spring because subterranean lifeforms usually outlast our will to eradicate them.

Notes:
Groh, Herbert. “Turkestan Alfalfa as a Medium of Weed Introduction,” Scientific Agriculture 21: 36-43:1940, cited by Zouhar.

Kiemnec, Gary L and M. L. Mcinnis. “Hoary Cress (Cardaria draba) Root Extract Reduces Germination and Root Growth of Five Plant Species,” Weed Technology 16:231-234:2002.

Oakley, R. A. and H. I. Westover. Commercial Varieties of Alfalfa, USDA Farmer’s Bulletin 757, 1916.

Zouhar, Kris. “Cardaria spp.,” US Forest Service Fire Effects Information System on-line database,2004

Photograph: Hoary cress buds near the post office, 21 March 2009.

Oxalis

What’s blooming in the area: Apricots, a few crabapples, one pink hyacinth, mossy phlox, hoary cress; tansy, tumble and purple mustard; native and common dandelion; Siberian elm in bud, arborvitae, piñon, and snakeweed greening. The truck garden was plowed early in the week, and weeds along the banks burned yesterday; so many people have been burning, the smell of smoke was strong Tuesday morning.
What’s blooming in my yard: Forsythia and oxalis; peach buds pink; first tulips, daffodils, daylilies, sweet peas, garlic chives, Maltese cross, Jupiter’s beard, tansy, and fern-leaf yarrow emerged; globe willow put out first leaves
What’s blooming inside: Bougainvillea, aptenia, kalanchoë; rochea few flowers.
Animal sightings: First ant hills, bird standing guard on the utility pole in morning, cabbage butterfly last Sunday.
Weather: Frost Monday and Tuesday; mornings later in week around 40, and afternoons rose to near 70; last rain 3/13/09; 12:16 hours of daylight.
Weekly update: The first flowers of spring are often weeds: dandelions, tansy mustard, the Oxalis that poked out last Sunday near my back porch. Usually domesticated plants wait until conditions stabilize, but this year’s early warmth fooled the five-petaled yellow perennial.
Wood sorrels are particularly sensitive to heat: I don’t usually see their quarter-inch flowers until the first of May, when they retire by midday. Scientists aren’t sure if the plants respond more to light, heat, or internal circadian rhythms, but anyone who has one knows the alternating sets of three leaves fold into pyramids at night, on cloudy days, when temperatures rise, and when they’re touched.
The little Oxalis began as a native wildflower that moved into greenhouses where its shamrock leaves spread along earthen floors. When its flat brown seeds settle in small pots used for perennials like purple coneflower, it shoulders aside the seedlings in its quest for food, water, and light. However, when it appears in larger containers with shrub cuttings like azaleas, it has little affect on the health of its host.
Today the plant is ubiquitous, but it’s provenance is obscure because botanists have used small differences to define discrete species, then applied the same terms for different variants, and now are grouping them all into a single class. Today only the more aggressive creeping rhizome, Oxalis corniculata, is separated from my stricta which starts out erect, then flops from the point where its branches emerge from the main stem. The reason the distinction survives may arise less from biology than the fact the first is seen as more difficult to eradicate in cool nurseries.
When I see people identify an Oxalis, I’m more sure of their personal experience than I am reality. I know John Josselyn saw a yellow wood sorrel in New England in the 1670’s, but I don’t know if Edward Tuckerman is correct to identify it as the creeping species. I’m sure the Cherokee use wood sorrel for a variety of purposes, but don’t know who is correct, Paul Hamel and Mary Chiltoskey, who suggest they use corniculata, or Myra Jean Perry who thinks they use my plant.
The differences don’t seem to matter much: people have substituted one species for another without serious consequences. Plains tribes use both the purple-flowered violacea and my yellow one as food for their children and horses. In Poland after World War II, children who ate the local white-petaled acetosella would eat the alien stricta when it appeared.
John Gerard used the local acetosella in a sauce to treat stomach problems in sixteenth century England, while Nicholas Culpepper recommended boiling the leaves into a red syrup for blood and ulcer problems in the mid 1650's. In this country, the Santa Clara chewed roots of the purple-flowered species for diarrhea, while San Ildefonso chewed the leaves to treat sores and swellings. Nearby Spanish-speakers boiled the leaves to expel worms.
By the end of the nineteenth century, King's American Dispensatory suggested both stricta and violacea were acceptable substitutes for the European acetosella, and found them useful against scurvy. However, every writer warns against overuse. The ascorbic acid converts into oxalic acid, which can bond with calcium in the body to produce kidney stones.
I think my Oxalis is a stricta that arrived from Iowa with a field-grown raspberry. I spotted the leaves in 2001 and 2003, and have seen the flowers every year since 2007 in the same place. In friendlier climes, it pollinates itself and the narrow green pods expel seed, sometimes spreading into a nuisance. Here I think a single yellow wood sorrel root has managed to survive in the drip line as one of the more benign signs of spring, one that blooms fitfully season after season without producing scratches or rashes.
Notes:Culpeper, Nicholas. Culpeper’s Complete Herbal and English Physician, 1650's; 1826 edition republished in 1981.Curtin, Leonora Scott Muse. Healing Herbs of the Upper Rio Grande, 1947, republished 1997, with revisions by Michael Moore.Felter, Harvey Wickes and John Uri Lloyd. King's American Dispensatory, 1898, Henriette Kress’s copy available online.Gerard, John. Gerard’s Herball, 1597; reprinted as Leaves from Gerard’s Herball, 1969, from a 1929 edition by Marcus Woodward.Josselyn, John. New England’s Rarities Discovered in Birds, Beasts, Fishes, Serpents and Plants of That Country, 1672, reprinted by University of Michigan, University Library with 1865 notes by Edward Tuckerman.Luczaj, Lukasz. "Archival Data on Wild Food Plants Used in Poland in 1948," Journal of Ethnobiology and Ethnomedicine 4:4:2008.Moerman, Dan. Native American Ethnobotany, 1998, and on-line database, includes Melvin R. Gilmore, Uses of Plants by the Indians of the Missouri River Region, 1919; Paul B. Hamel and Mary U. Chiltoskey, Cherokee Plants and Their Uses -- A 400 Year History, 1975; and Myra Jean Perry, Food Use of "Wild" Plants by Cherokee Indians, 1975.Robbins, William Wilfred, John Peabody Harrington, and Barbara Friere-Marreco, Ethnobotany of the Tewa Indians, 1916.
Photograph: Yellow Oxalis flower, 15 March 2009.

Juniper

Local signs of spring: Some apricots blooming in village; prairie, hay fields, and purple asters greening; daffodils, mustard tansy, dandelions, and cheat grass up.

What’s happening in my yard: Roses, vinca, bouncing Bess, and chrysanthemums putting our new leaves; hyacinths growing; iris and grape hyacinths coming up.

What’s blooming inside: Bougainvillea, aptenia, rochea, and kalanchoë; snake plant put out new sprout.

Animal sightings: Horses brought in to pasture.

Weather: Storm sat over area for a week, early morning temperatures alternated between 20 and 40, rain finally fall Friday; 11:56 hours of daylight.

Weekly update: The first signs of spring have arrived - stuffy noses, runny eyes, sneezes.

Each year I listen to friends blame it on juniper blossoms. I fully sympathize with their miseries but I have a problem with the idea of an evergreen with flowers. Too many artists’ renderings of dinosaurs in swamps surrounded by giant ferns, mastodons feeding on grass, and graceful mammals cavorting with flowers and insects impressed on my young mind that conifers do not bloom.

They may have seed cones, but they don’t have petals. That was the great dividing line in plant development between the gymnosperms and the angiosperms. Indeed, it was the drying of the earth that led to the great revolution. The sperm of earlier plants moved through water. When water disappeared, natured adapted with pollen that sailed through the air.

The long extinct seed ferns that developed in the coal swamps of West Virginia in the upper Devonian were the first to use pollen. Imprints from characteristic leaves for the cypress family have been found in upper Triassic, and evidence of two existing junipers from the upper Cretaceous. The local sabina subgroup of junipers with serrated leaf edges appeared with the Madro-tertiary geoflora of the Eocene and early Oligocene in México.

Last weekend I walked out to the nearest juniper on the prairie to see what it is, in fact, they are doing this time of year that causes so much suffering.

The male tree had clusters of brown leaves mixed in with the green that looked like piñon nuts from a distance. The strobili had emerged last fall, and over the winter pollen had developed in sacs on their underbellies. When the cones on distant female trees reach puberty, their end scales will part and sticky droplets form. Soon after, these pollen sacs will open and fling their life force to the wind.

At the time it leaves the tree, the tiny, spherical pollen grain is shrouded in two layers. When it lands, the thick inner, intine layer absorbs moisture from the droplet and ruptures. That, in turn, expels proteins from cavities in the outer, exine layer. If the female recognizes the chemicals as gifts from an appropriate suitor, the drop will desicate and the pollen grain will be pulled into the female cone for fertilization.

When a misguided pollen grain lands in a moist human space, it still sends out protein scouts to determine if a pollen tube can follow. The first time, the body generates an allergen specific antibody that lodges on the surface of a mast cell. The next time a grain of pollen intrudes, a waiting immunoglobulin E antibody snatches it. When enough are captured, the underlying mast cells release histamines and other inflammatory substances that trigger allergic symptoms.

In Santa Fe, where temperatures are more moderate and water more plentiful than here in the valley, one-seeded junipers grow close enough along the road to form pygmy forests. Nature could perpetuate itself there with mild breezes. Here in the grasslands, hundreds of feet separate Juniperus monosperma trees. Everywhere pollens are released for weeks, and travel miles.

Outsiders arrive in northern New Mexico awed by what they see as an ancient land. In fact, the Oligocene mountains are so young they haven’t yet eroded enough to produce foothills. Instead, dumps of Santa Fe composites parallel the volcanic Jemez and uplifted Sangre de Cristo. The barren ridges and lower mountain sides have been colonized by a far older life form, the junipers. Each year unsuspecting latecomers find themselves trapped in nature’s primeval rite of spring when the very air they breathe is turned into a great fertility bath of floating pollen.

Notes:
Upper Devonian - 360-374 million years ago, Appalachians, seed ferns
Upper Triassic - 213-231 million years ago, desert, cypress family
Upper Cretaceous - 65-97.5 million years ago, swamps, junipers
Eocene - 38.0-54.9 million years ago - arid southwest, sabina clade of junipers
Oligocene - 24.6-38 million years ago - Sangre de Cristo uplift, first Jemez fault

Adams, Robert P. "The Serrate Leaf Margined Juniperus (Section Sabina) of the Western Hemisphere: Systematics and Evolution Based on Leaf Essential Oils and Random Amplified Polymorphic DNAs (RAPDs)," Biochemical Systematics and Ecology 28:975-989:2000.

Emberlin, Jean C. "Aerobiology" in William W. Busse and Stephen T. Holgate, Asthma and Rhinitis, volume 2, 2000 edition.

Mugnaini, Serena , Massimo Nepi, Massimo Guarnieri, Beti Piotto, and Ettore Pacini. "Pollination Drop in Juniperus communis: Response to Deposited Material," Annals of Botany 100:1475-81:2007, describes female behavior.

Stewart, Wilson N. and Gar W. Rothwell. Paleobotany and the Evolution of Plants, 1993 second edition.

Wodehouse, Roger P. Hayfever Plants, 1945, describes male behavior.

Photograph: Male one-seeded juniper with brown pollen cones between serrated green leaves, 7 March 2009.

Irrigation Ditch

What’s still green: Juniper and other conifers; rose, lilac and chamisa stems; Apache plume, honeysuckle, prickly pear, yucca, hyacinth, rock rose, dandelions; three men working on new ditches, two have piles of block near their fences.
What’s gray, blue or gray-green: Piñon, winterfat, saltbush, loco, snow-in-summer.
What’s red: Branches of apple and peach; stems on cholla and some shrub along the river; leaves on pinks, coral bells, beardtongues, small-leaf soapwort, pink and yellow evening primroses, some golden spur columbine, purple aster and anthemis.
What’s yellow: Globe and weeping willow branches; arborvitae and other conifers.
What’s blooming inside: Bougainvillea, aptenia, rochea, and kalanchoë.
Animal sightings: Heavy clouds kept birds in early mornings.
Weather: Too warm, too dry, too windy, too soon; couple trees started to bloom near the river; piles of Russian thistle collecting; all signs of rain that hit my roof early Saturday were gone by daybreak; 11:35 hours of daylight.
Weekly update: Ditch meetings are remembered as times when the community came together to elect its leaders and plan its communal work. The one a week ago was more like a corporate shareholders meeting, with an irrigation district manager who reported the previous year’s activities, provided status on construction projects, and announced when water would begin running.
People also like to remember that work as some festive spring weekend. Alvar Carlson said the original ditches often began when an ox gouged a furrow with a wooden blade that men deepened with spades. They piled the dirt they dredged along the banks to increase the carrying capacity of the ditches. In the 1930's, men spent at least thirty days each summer repairing the village ditch and twenty days on the one along the main road.
When settlers were expanding into lands between the Santa Clara and San Ildefonso in the 1730's, the Santa Cruz alcalde, Domingo Vigil, expected the San Ildefonso to extend the ditch in exchange for an agreement that a disputed grant stay within the control of specified local people. When San Ildefonso complained to the colonial governor, Juan Domingo de Bustamante ruled the natives couldn’t be forced to clean the ditch.
Constructing and maintaining secondary ditches is still unpleasant, hard labor. Last spring I ran into a drunk near the post office who told me he’d just returned from helping clean one of the ditches. He wanted me to cash a casino chip he claimed had been used to pay him.
Some ditches in my area are underground, but there are still many open sections where Russian thistles and trash collect. The association hires a man with a backhoe to do the major cleaning, including killing stumps. When a hay farmer at the ditch meeting asked why he couldn’t get water as early as the ditches nearer town, he was told scheduling that clean-up depended on how late the spring winds were blowing in new tumbleweeds.
Last summer our mayordomo offered to sell me some of the water rights the irrigation district had been buying to prevent Española and Santa Fé from obtaining them as a ruse to claim the water. One man down hill from me apparently took him up and is now busily repeating the work of the pioneers.
First, he or the ditch managers, hired a backhoe to bury a pipe from his property to the main ditch. Next, someone had to patch the crack that left in the county pavement. Then the man installed a pump to pull the water uphill to his property. Recently, he used a backhoe blade to level his land enough so water can be effective. This past week he dug another ditch going uphill the length of his property to distribute water and had dirt delivered to compensate for his scraped away topsoil. In five weeks, he will be able to connect some gated irrigation pipe to his pump and call the mayordomo to open the valve to water his small holding.
It’s hard to see how my neighbor can ever recover the costs of his investment. But when the water runs, perhaps it will be enough to show his kids. A friend of mine in town, where water is available on a schedule rather than on demand, tells me:
"We get water on Wednesday thru Saturday. From that point on, we simply share the water by taking our individual turn when our neighbor is done watering. For instance, when my neighbor next to me is watering, I simply ask him to let me know when he is done watering. When he is done, he releases the flow to me and I water my yard. When I'm done, if any other neighbor needs the water, I let them know when I'm done and release the water to them. If nobody needs the water after I'm done, I go to the main ditch and close the water flow down to our street. Over the years, it’s been kind of fun to water because it seems to keep our neighborhood close in that we get to chat and visit when we're exchanging water. I love it when the water is released to us. I've been working with water and crops almost all of my life and is something that I truly love. I should have been a farmer."
Even when the latest technology replaces the forgotten drudgery of the past, new ditch memories are made every summer.
Notes:Carlson, Alvar W. The Spanish-American Homeland, 1990.
Twichell, Ralph Emerson. The Spanish Archives of New Mexico, volume 1, 1914, on 1730's.
US Department of Interior, Tewa Basin Study, volume 2, 1935, reprinted by Marta Weigle as Hispanic Villages of Northern New Mexico, 1975, on 1930's.
Photograph: Our local ditch filled with Russian thistles and pigweed; the concrete feeds through a metal culvert that goes under the road and is faced with plywood to stabilize the bank; 28 February 2009.

Irrigation District

What’s still green: Juniper and other conifers; rose and lilac stems; Apache plume, honeysuckle, prickly pear, yucca, hyacinth, rock rose, some grasses and weeds beginning to green in places along road.
What’s gray, blue or gray-green: Piñon, winterfat, saltbush, loco, snow-in-summer.
What’s red: Branches of apple and peach; stems on cholla and some shrub along the river; leaves on pinks, coral bells, beardtongues, small-leaf soapwort, pink and yellow evening primroses, some golden spur columbine, purple aster and anthemis.
What’s yellow: Globe and weeping willow branches; arborvitae and other conifers.
What’s blooming inside: South African aptenia and kalanchoë.
Animal sightings: Small birds flit through lower branches of peach and cherries mid-mornings; rabbit out last night at twilight.Weather: Early morning temperatures varied from low 20's to high 30's; afternoons near 60; last rain 1/24/09; 11:25 hours of daylight today.
Weekly update: Our annual ditch meeting was held this past Tuesday at the local firehouse. We’re now part of the Santa Cruz Irrigation District which has absorbed some twenty ditches, including three in my immediate area, since the federal government took over a botched private project begun in 1925 by John Block to dam the Santa Cruz river near Chimayó for the benefit of lowland farmers.
Arroyos, deep and wide, once defined the limits of irrigation supported settlement for people who no longer remembered how Romans built those aqueducts at Mérida in the conquistadores’ Estremaduran homeland. Hollowed logs were used to span canyons and gullies.
The village ditch existed between a wide arroyo and the river. Another somehow passed that barrier and stopped at the next deep arroyo. My ditch is more recent and uses metal pipes to carry water over one deep arroyo before dumping on ranch land before the next major break.
Open trenches were being used by the pueblos when Juan de Oñate arrived in 1598, and still exist in areas where canals cross Santa Clara land. The path of the main ditch uphill from the main road can be traced by the presence of trees in otherwise open grass and scrub land. In places where active laterals come down to cross the road, trees follow the open ditches. In other places, lines of trees survive where the ditches have either been filled or replaced with concealed metal pipes.
Many distribution ditches in the village are still open troughs, edged with grass or weeds; only a few have sluice gates Metal culverts now carry the water under drives, although a few have installed cattle guards. Portland concrete was perfected by Thomas Edison in 1902, and some ditches have been lined. Such reinforcement was an individual choice, so cement sections alternate with earthen ones.
The irrigation network on the other side of the arroyo required hours of maintenance in the 1930's, and had the highest concentration of people unable to pay fees for irrigation. Although the interior department didn’t provide reasons, it suggested the other area where people couldn’t afford the dam construction levies, La Puebla, had a channel that ran through sandy land with banks that constantly collapsed. Each breach meant their land could be silted and crops destroyed.
The ditch along the main road may have been sighted through equally bad land when its builders needed to find a way around the arroyo. It could be the more ambitious thought the high location would allow them to irrigate more land. It may also be they had forgotten what the early Spanish colonists knew who spent time looking for non-porous land for the acequia madre before they established a settlement.
When the Reconstruction Finance Corporation intervened in 1935, the agent for the receivers, Cook, had already taken over 75 pieces of land in the district, and resold some to migrants from Texas and Oklahoma. At some time in the recent past, hay farmers who settled along the main road buried their sections of ditch and installed surface valves to feed ten-foot sections of portable, perforated aluminum pipe that flood their fields. Recently, some homeowners who bought lots from those farmers have been using gated PVC pipe to water lawns.
Lost knowledge, new knowledge are separated by a wide arroyo from traditional village ways in an irrigation district that stretches from Fairview, settled briefly by Mormons in 1895, through Sombrillo now farmed by Sikhs and on down to La Puebla where Los Penitentes were active. Tourists use the lake formed by the dam, while everyone with water rights, from traditional settlements along the Santa Cruz to our Anglo hay farmers, depends on collected snow melt for vegetable plots and commercial fields, flower gardens and suburban lawns.
The social structures that govern water may have changed, technologies have certainly been modernized, but the challenges of growing anything but Russian thistles on dry land remain constant. If you see something green here, there will be a ditch nearby.
Notes:
Calkins, Hugh G. "The Santa Cruz Irrigation District - New Mexico," 1937, on-line through New Mexico’s Digital Collections project.Carlson, Alvar W. The Spanish-American Homeland, 1990, describes log cañolas.Dobkins, Betty Eakle. The Spanish Element in Texas Water Law, 1959, cited by José A. Rivera and Thomas F. Glick, "The Iberian Origins of New Mexico’s Community Acequias," Economic History Congress, 2002, for how settlers selected land for ditches.US Department of Interior, Tewa Basin Study, volume 2, 1935, reprinted by Marta Weigle as Hispanic Villages of Northern New Mexico, 1975.
Photograph: Head ditch paralleling road with wooden gates; irrigated field on other side of embankment/dyke was burned this week; road near village, 28 February 2009.

Anthemis

What’s still green: Juniper and other conifers; rose and lilac stems; Apache plume, honeysuckle, prickly pear, yucca, rock rose, some grasses; forsythia buds greening; first hyacinth bulbs poking through, new Mexican hat and black-eyed Susan leaves. Smell of burning was in the air Saturday morning.
What’s gray, blue or gray-green: Piñon, winterfat, saltbush, loco, snow-in-summer.
What’s red: Branches of apple and peach; stems on cholla and some shrub along the river; leaves on pinks, coral bells, beardtongues, small-leaf soapwort, pink and yellow evening primroses, some golden spur columbine, purple aster and anthemis.
What’s yellow: Globe and weeping willow branches; arborvitae and other conifers.
What’s blooming inside: South African aptenia, rochea, and kalanchoë.
Animal sightings: Domestic flock of some dark fowl with small heads and large bodies feeding near the village yesterday; wild birds still making noise in the morning from the river.
Weather: Mornings still cold, afternoons warmer, little water left to frost my windshield. I gave up on local stores and finally ordered a copy of the only almanac that provides useful daylight information, The Old Farmers Almanac, published in Dublin, New Hampshire; there are 11:16 hours of sun today.
Weekly update: I have the luxury of growing plants for strictly aesthetic reasons. When I lived in Michigan, my anthemis Kelway went to seed. I have no idea if I ever saw the same plant two years in a row, but knew I could always expect a great mass of wide yellow flowers in summer. It mattered nought they were "so little stationary" they were a problem for 18th century English plant hunters who depended on them for a living.
When I planted the old world native here two years ago, I hoped the self-fertilizing flowers would reprise their northern wetland behavior and spread a more matte, paler yellow amongst the similarly migrating Mexican hats and coreopsis, blanket and chocolate flowers. Last summer they bloomed for the first time. This winter their flat junipery leaves stayed green under piles of snow dumped from the roof in December, but turned red a few weeks ago when the cold cover disappeared.
Assyrians living under Ashurbanipal between 626 and 608 bc had no such economic freedom. When they saw the yellow composites, they saw a potential dye. This may seem obvious to us today when craftsmen can buy books on local dye plants, but the discovery that fabrics could be colored came long after the invention of textiles, and required someone somewhere to notice that treating yarn with a metal salt changed the fiber so it could accept a water-soluble pigment that wouldn’t wash off or fade.
No one knows where that discovery was made. We have some Chinese written references to dyes in the Western Zhou Dynasty (1045–711 bc) that suggest gardenia was used for yellow; a scrap of untested red fabric and a water-tight brick floor from Mohenjo Daro (2600-1900 bc) in the Indus valley; some safflower from Tell Hamman et Turkmen (2500 bc) in northern Syria and great deal of connecting open steppe inhabited by tribes that left no written records.
The yellow pigment from safflower was used on mummy wrappings found in the non-royal Tomb of the Two Brothers from the 12th Dynasty of Egypt (1985-1773 bc), but the dye was so heavily applied researchers believed the tinting was done just before the burial when there was no requirement fot it to survive light or water. Even though the madder used for Tutankhamun, who died some centuries later in 1343 bc, had been treated with aluminum and calcium salts, it still wasn’t boil proof.
Once dyers fully realized the importance of mordants, they would have begun experimenting and discovered different techniques and different metals produced different results with the same plant. The knowledge became the family inheritance, protected by secrecy from outsiders, and thus vulnerable to loss when synthetic dyes were substituted in the late 19th century.
A few years ago, a Turkish team interested in reintroducing natural dyes tested crop-grown Anthemis tinctoria with eight mordants and found wool treated before the dye bath turned some shade of solid, deep yellow, while that treated after varied from light yellow to cream and beige. When the mordant was included with the dye, the wool absorbed greenish hues. It’s the brown tones that were used in Azerbaijani rugs; in Turkey the finished yarns were dipped in an alkaline ash solution for a gloss that would have further altered the colors.
Anthemis never became a popular dye: weld was cheaper and more versatile, saffron carried more prestige. When field workers asked people the dyes they remembered, the plant was mentioned only once in the Latium region of Italy, but in Ezurum in eastern Anatolia people knew the colors that came from treating wool with alum, iron sulfate and chrome.
The only other place dyer’s chamomile has been mentioned is Latvia. There at the northern end of that open space traversed by the Indo-Europeans and all the other peoples, goods, and ideas that moved beyond the ken of the classic writers, it was used for the woven sashes used as signifiers of status and luxury.
Notes:
For information on rug dyes, see commercial sites like Seeing Is Dreaming and Azerbaijan Rugs.Barber, E. J. W. Prehistoric Textiles, 1992, discusses the quality of the evidence from India and the Tomb of the Two Brothers.Campbell Thompson, R. The Assyrian Herbal, 1924, cited by Lise Manniche, An Ancient Egyptian Herbal, 1989.Guarrera, Paolo Maria. "Household Dyeing Plants and Traditional Uses in Some Areas of Italy," Journal of Ethnobiology and Ethnomedicine 2:9:2006.Kizil, Süleyman, Nuran Kayabsşi, and Neşet Arslan. "Determination of some Agronomical and Dying Properties of Dyer’s Chamomile (Anthemic Tinctoria L.)," Journal of Central European Agriculture 6:403-408:2005.Las Arañas Spinners and Weavers Guild, Inc. Dying with Natural Materials, 2004 edition of Vegetable Dyes of New Mexico, 1970, prepared by Jodie Aves and Janislee Wiese.
Nicholson, Paul T. and Ian Shaw. Ancient Egyptian Materials and Technology, 2000, discusses the quality of the evidence from Syria and Egypt.
Özgökçe, Fevzi and ĪIbrahim Yilmaz. "Dye Plants of East Anatolia Region (Turkey)," Economic Botany 57:454-460:2003.

Pīigozne, Ieva. "Latvian Folk Dress," 2008," available on-line.

Sowerby, James. English Botany, 1790.

Welters, Linda and Īra Kuhn-Bolšaitis. "The Cultural Significance of Belts in Latvian Dress" in Linda Welters, Folk Dress in Europe and Anatolia: Beliefs about Protection and Fertility, 1999.

Wu, S. S., and Z. B.Tian. Zhong guo yin ran shi (Chinese History of Dyeing and Weaving), 1986, cited by Yun Ye, Lynn G. Salmon, and Glen R. Cass, "The Ozone Fading of Traditional Chinese Plant Dyes," Journal of the American Institute for Conservation 39:245-257:2000.

Photograph: Red and green anthemis leaves protected by dead cherry leaves, taken from above, 21 February 2009.

Winter Color

What’s still green: Juniper and other conifers; rose and lilac stems; Apache plume, honeysuckle, prickly pear, yucca, iris, rock rose, sea pink, only the most well-protected hollyhock, red hot poker and mum leaves; some grasses. Someone cut high branches on trees along the main road, probably to maintain clearance for transporting house trailers and delivery vans.
What’s gray, blue or gray-green: Piñon, winterfat, saltbush, loco, snow-in-summer.
What’s red: Branches of apple and peach; stems on cholla and some shrub along the river; leaves on pinks, coral bells, beardtongues, small-leaf soapwort, pink and yellow evening primroses, some golden spur columbine, purple aster and anthemis.
What’s yellow: Globe and weeping willow branches; arborvitae and other conifers.
What’s blooming inside: South African aptenia, rochea, and kalanchoë.
Animal sightings: Small birds flit through the cottonwood.
Weather: Tuesday’s snow was gone by end of day; only ice left is on the north side of the house where if fell from the roof in December; morning temperatures in high 20's.
Weekly update: The snow is all but gone, but not the thirsty air which, no longer satisfied with drying mud, sucks water from every living thing. And some that have passed beyond.
Color intensifies in dead leaves and seed heads, when only dried pigments remain. Bare branches of globe willows and the weeping one down the road are more yellow, while chamisa and snakeweed stems are bright green. Arborvitae leaves have turned chartreuse or dark brown. More roses and beardstongues have red parts, while purple aster leaves collect morning frosts. The greys remain grey, but dead Russian thistles blacken.
These are the killing times when the days grow longer and warmer, but the mornings still fall into the twenties. The additional energy from the sun stimulates chloroplasts, the parts of plant cells that synthesize carbon dioxide (C0₂) from the air into glucose (C₆H₁₂O₆), at the very time there’s less water (H₂0) available to support the necessary chemical reactions. Unused energy provokes crises.
Conifers respond by slowing their photosynthesis. As the blue and red light-absorbing chlorophyl disappears, the yellow pigments that coexist in the chloroplast to absorb other parts of the light spectrum become obvious. Even willow and aspen barks, which maintain some level of photosynthesis during the winter for deciduous trees, reduce their metabolism.
Some non-herbaceous perennials have been producing red anthocyanin pigments (C₂₁H₂₀O₁₁) at the very time their chloroplasts are too stressed to effectively produce glucose from the same components. However, the cyanidin-3-O-glucoside flavonoid traps the mid-range of light, the greens and hotter yellows between 500 and 600nm. When Kevin Gould compared red and green leaves of saxifrage shrubs from New Zealand, he found the pigments located in the upper epidermal layer and in the mesophyll, the soft center with the chloroplasts, reduced productivity pressures by absorbing 23% of the inhaled carbon dioxide.
In optimal times, chloroplasts return the excess oxygen atoms extracted from raw materials back into the environment. The chain of chemical reactions that goes by the name photosynthesis includes many oxygen-rich intermediate stages and oxygen electron transfers that can damage cells if the process is altered slightly by poor environmental conditions. This led Hideo Yamasaki to test the possibility that anthocyanin compounds found in hibiscus flowers protect plants by acting as antioxidants.
Since, Velissarios-Phaedon Kytridis and Yiannis Manetas have looked specifically at red and green leaves from two shrubs that store the pigment near the chloroplast in the central layer and two that keep anthocyanin in the epidermis. They found the former were better able to handle laboratory-induced oxygen stress, probably because the pigment’s proximity to the chloroplast allowed it to more effectively intercept wayward oxy-radicals.
Unfortunately, his epidermal shrubs included roses. A few weeks ago several of my hybrid teas still had green leaves, and two in back had red ones. Now all that remain are green stems. Few roots have ever made it through February and March, and none with enough vigor to thrive the following summer. They may be red, but they’re not as cleverly armored against New Mexico’s late winters as the native asters and beardtongues.
Notes:Foote, Knowlton C. and Michail Schaedle. "Diurnal and Seasonal Patterns of Photosynthesis and Respiration by Stems of Populus tremuloides Michx.," Plant Physiology 58:651-655:1976.Gould, Kevin S., Thomas C. Vogelmann, Tao Han, and Michael J. Clearwater. "Profiles of Photosynthesis Within Red and Green Leaves of Quintinia serrata," Physiologia Plantarum 116:127-133:2002.Kytridis, Velissarios-Phaedon and Yiannis Manetas. "Mesophyll versus Epidermal Anthocyanins as Potential in Vivo Antioxidants: Evidence Linking the Putative Antioxidant Role to the Proximity of Oxy-radical Source," Journal of Experimental Botany 57:2203-2210:2006;their mesophyll test plants were Cistus creticus and Photinia x fraseri; the epidermal ones were Rosa sp. and Ricinus communis.Yamasaki, H, H. Uefuji, and Y. Sakihama. "Bleaching of the Red Anthocyanin Induced by Superoxide Radical," Archives of Biochemistry and Biophysics 332:183-186:1996.
Photograph: Weeping willow with yellowing bark and conifers down the road, 14 February 2009.

Red Hot Poker

What’s still green: Juniper and other conifers, roses, Apache plume, honeysuckle, prickly pear, yucca, red hot poker, iris, vinca, rock rose, hollyhocks, sweet pea, sea lavender, sea pink, pinks, snapdragon, yellow and blue flax, yellow evening primroses, mums, anthemis, some grasses.

What’s gray, blue or gray-green: Piñon, winterfat, saltbush, buddleia, loco, snow-in-summer, yellow alyssum.

What’s red: Cholla, coral bells, beardtongues, soapworts, pink evening primrose, golden spur columbine, purple aster.

What’s yellow: Globe and weeping willow branches; arborvitae.

What’s blooming inside: South African aptenia, rochea, and kalanchoë.

Animal sightings: Except for dogs, animals are staying out of sight when commuters are about.

Weather: Some snow remains on the north side of the house. Morning temperatures still drop to the 20's, afternoons are still warm, and frost still forms from moisture pulled from the ground and plants. Last rain, 1/24/09.

Weekly update: My red hot pokers have always been a step behind my neighbors.

When I moved here, people’s Kniphofia bloomed in early to mid May with grape hyacinth-types spikes on stems at least 3' high, with bright orange flowers above and older, yellow ones below. When I ordered some Pfitzer Hybrids in 1999 from Weiss Brothers they came into flower a month later, a foot shorter and with more subdued colors. One plant, at the west end of the bed, never blooms until late summer.

Sometime each May I clear dead leaves from the bank where they grow with Dutch iris. The tan iris leaves pull away, but not the pokers’. They have to be cut or left another year before the plant is willing to let go. I never see piles of debris around my neighbors’ clumps.

Some leaves stay green well into winter, under protection of the upper ones that die with the cold. In the past week or so, many of those leaves have turned red, as photosynthesis has slowed, probably because the air is still sucking water from the soil and plant tissue.

Common torch lilies, as they’re also called, are usually defined as variants of the uvaria species. When the aloe family members were first introduced into gardens after the Boers and British moved into the interior of South Africa in the early nineteenth century, they bloomed in fall and needed protection in winter, usually from ashes. As late as 1920, the Encyclopedia Americana suggested the rhizomes be planted in the shrubbery to bloom between mid-summer and frost.

Walter Pfitzer introduced his hybrids in 1893 in Stuttgart. In 1907, The Journal of Horticulture told its readers the basal clumps of sword-like green leaves bloomed in August and September. A few years later, Liberty Hyde Bailey believed they were the same as the 5' tall grandis variety then in the trade.

Somewhere something changed. Max Leichtlin, a bulb breeder in Baden-Baden, may have introduced the more refined perennials in 1881. Bailey described his carnosa variety as less than 2' tall with apricot-colored flowers. At some point my plants’ ancestors may have mixed with praecox or some other spring blooming species.

The hardiness was probably indigenous to the genus, which grows along eastern Africa from Yemen to the Cape of Good Hope. Syd Ramdhani identified four centers of diversification in South Africa and one in Madagascar, and found most species thrive in high, mountainous grasslands like the Española valley. Chloé Galley’s team believes the Drakensburg mountains were the first center for the genus.

As for the red pigments, they fade from individual flowers as they loose their ability to interest birds as pollinators, leaving the basic yellow, but apparently persist in leaves when the chlorophyl disappears this time of year.

Gradations in time are apparently endemic to the species, and not just the result of seed grown plants and the vagaries of commercial nurseries. The ability to stay in tune with changes in environment was what Ramdhani believed made it possible for the genus to survive climate changes that followed the tectonic plate movements that first precipitated the diversification, and, on a much smaller scale, allow my hybrids to survive rio arriba winters when they might fail in the north.

Being out of step with one’s neighbors is sometimes the only way to survive when the times themselves are out of joint.

Notes:
Encyclopedia Americana. "Tritoma," 1920.

Galley, Chloé Galley, Benny Bytebier, Dirk U Bellstedt, and H Peter Linder. "The Cape Element in the Afrotemperate Flora: from Cape to Cairo?," Royal Society, Biological Sciences section Proceedings 22:535–543:2007.

Journal of Horticulture and Home Farmer, The. "Hardy Plant Notes" for 15 June 1907 discuss Pfitzer and tritoma.

Miller, Wilhelm and Liberty Hyde Bailey. "Kniphofia" in Liberty Hyde Bailey, The Standard Cyclopedia of Horticulture, 1914.

Ramdhani, S. Evolutionary and Biogeographic Studies in the Genus Kniphofia Moench (Asphodelaceae), 2007.

Photograph: Red hot poker stem and leaves laid low by the snow, with seed ready to drop through openings, 31 January 2009.

Yucca

What’s still green: Juniper and other conifers, roses, Apache plume, honeysuckle, prickly pear, yucca, red hot poker, iris, vinca, rock rose, hollyhocks, sweet pea, sea lavender, sea pink, pinks, snapdragon, yellow and blue flax, yellow evening primroses, mums, anthemis, some grasses; Russian thistles gathering at fences.
What’s gray, blue or gray-green: Piñon, winterfat, saltbush, buddleia, loco, snow-in-summer, yellow alyssum.
What’s red: Cholla, coral bells, beardtongues, soapworts, pink evening primrose, golden spur columbine, purple aster.
What’s yellow: Globe and weeping willow branches; arborvitaes are either dark brown or chartreuse.
What’s blooming inside: South African aptenia, rochea, and kalanchoë.
Animal sightings: Small birds in cottonwood and catalpa early mornings.
Weather: Morning temperatures were ten degrees warmer earlier in the week; snow receding from the front of the house has uncovered spots of green. Last rain, 1/24/09.
Weekly update: There are times when I’m driving across New Mexico when I feel I’ve slipped into another dimension. It’s been miles since the last settlement and there’s been only grass and barbed wire fronting a road still sloping from the Great Plains to the Rockies. Then the rocks change.
Going southwest along route 152 towards Lordsburg, the ridges start to close in on fields, and suddenly there are great soaptree yuccas, the elatas that resemble palm trees with angry porcupine heads of long, green leaves. Going southeast along 84 to Clovis, just as I’m mesmerized by the passing sameness, the caprock of the staked plains begins, and so do the yuccas. This time they’re shorter, but stalks with the remains of previous seasons’ flowers still stand in huddles.
Last summer I wandered down the ranch road south of my house where the ground swells before dropping to the sandy bed of an arroyo. The road itself falls so steeply, ten-foot high walls rise above my head. I looked up, and there on my left were three yucca sentinels silhouetted against the horizon.
The inward-folding leaves are shorter than other yuccas, less than two feet high, and much, much narrower, no more than a quarter inch wide. Yesterday, they were a dark yellow-tinged green, with fibers escaping the white leaf margins near the bases of the rosettes. Only a few had old flower stalks, and they were ones with few leaves that looked like they were dying. Surrounding them were shorter plants, probably new sprouts from the rhizomatous roots. Maybe sixty clumps grew on both sides of the cut.
In the early twentieth century, the Santa Clara used the saponin-rich roots of Yucca baccata for soap to wash clothing and their hair, a practice that passed to the Spanish who called it amole. The p’a fruits were gathered in fall for food. The dark, relatively wide, inward-sweeping leaves were boiled, then chewed to free the fibers for cordage.
When I moved here several people had Yucca glauca plants with grey leaves several feet high, some with blades that flexed outwards. While my near neighbor has them behind his house, most planted them near the roadside fence where they bloomed this past year in May. Leonora Curtin was told by people to the north that some in the village used palmilla to curdle milk, and heard rumors the sharp-tipped leaves were used as scourges by Los Penitentes.
Generally, yuccas are scarce away from houses here, either because they’ve been cleared for wheat, sheep and cattle, or because they were always selective about their environments at our 6000' altitude. Yesterday, I saw only one wild plant outside the prairie, but ten people had three or four-foot plants with green, straight leaves, and three had ones with reflexed gray ones.
I suspect the ones on the prairie may be the narrow-leaved angustissima, found elsewhere in the county, that grew from black seed brought by the heavy equipment that dug the road. There’s no other explanation for two colonies facing each other across a deep divide. The wind could have blown seed or an animal run up and down the canyon walls, but first there had to be seed and then a direct wind or an animal too dumb to use the road to escape a predator.
Although some glaucas can fertilize themselves when the six creamy-white petals close upon the anthers, most species are pollinated by a yucca moth that perpetuates itself by laying eggs in the fruit. If conditions are wrong, the insects don’t hatch when the plants are in flower. After a bad winter, they may not emerge at all.
Any plant that relies on a single type of moth that can lie dormant for thirty years lives in a different sphere. In that world, those prairie plants are but a few seconds old, and my neighbors’ nurtured specimens mere visitors from the realm of the mundane.
Notes:Curtin, Leonora Scott Muse. Healing Herbs of the Upper Rio Grande, 1947, republished 1997, with revisions by Michael Moore.Dodd, Rhea Jean and Yan B. Linhart. "Reproductive Consequences of Interactions between Yucca glauca (Agavaceae) and Tegeticula yuccasella (Lepidoptera) in Colorado," American Journal of Botany 81:815-825:1994.Powell, J. A. "Longest Insect Dormancy: Yucca Moth Larvae (Lepidoptera: Prodoxidae) Metamorphose after 20, 25, and 30 Years in Diapause," Annals of the Entomological Society of America 94:677-680:2001.Robbins, William Wilfred, John Peabody Harrington, and Barbara Friere-Marreco, Ethnobotany of the Tewa Indians, 1916.United States Department of Agriculture, Natural Resources Conservation Service. New Mexico county distribution maps for angustissima,baccata, elata, and glauca.
Photograph: Narrow-leaf yucca with needle grass along the ranch road, 25 January 2009.

Chaste Tree

What’s still green: Juniper and other conifers, roses, Apache plume, honeysuckle, prickly pear, yucca, red hot poker, vinca, rock rose, sweet pea, sea pink, hollyhocks, pinks, snapdragon, golden spur columbine, some grasses. Someone down the road was pruning his apples yesterday.
What’s gray, blue or gray-green: Piñon, winterfat, saltbush, buddleia, loco, snow-in-summer.
What’s red: Cholla, coral bells, beardtongues, soapworts, pink evening primrose, purple aster.
What’s blooming inside: Brazilian Christmas cactus, South African aptenia, rochea, and kalanchoë.
Animal sightings: Small birds in the cottonwood yesterday; sounds of fowl by the river earlier in the week.
Weather: A little rain Friday night, afternoons warmer.
Weekly update: Last summer’s remaindered temptations were two blue-flowered chaste trees. It wasn’t until I got the pots home that I remembered they need protection to survive zone 6 winters.
Rather than watch them die in the western blue border, I stuck the woody shrubs on the enclosed porch with some vague hope they might grow like trees in an atrium. Instead, their buds turned to dark berries without any evidence of an intervening stage, then the leaves turned brown. Since they’d shown no tolerance for missed waterings, I assumed they needed to be kept moist. To no avail, the leaves fell. I abandoned them in December. The only reason they’re still here is the snow, ice and mud have so disrupted use of the drive that only the most critical trash has been taken to the road.
Monday I happened to look at them when I was watering the geraniums and noticed new green leaves towards the top of each. Nothing obvious had changed: they’d had no water for more than a month, temperatures had ranged between 36 and 92 since I last reset the thermometer. Only the quality of the light streaming through the southeastern windows was different.
I thought I knew what deciduous meant. By the time I was in fourth grade, I’d been told the difference between northern evergreens and Michigan hardwoods that turned color after the first frosts of fall. However, the ability to shed and regrow leaves actually appeared in the warm Early Cretaceous when swamps were widespread and flowering plants just evolving. Daniel Axelrod believes when the climate began drying, the wetland plants that survived were those that sloughed unnecessary energy drains during droughts, like my chaste trees had done last summer when I forgot to water them.
After the unknown event that killed off the dinosaurs at the end of the Cretaceous, temperatures rose an average 18 degrees and precipitation quadrupled for nearly a million years. Jack Wolfe found deciduous trees moved north, then became dominant towards the poles. At some latitude, the absence of winter light became more critical to sustaining photosynthesis, than temperature or water. Those plants that could respond to reduced day length by shedding leaves were the ones that survived, like my nursery-grown clones did last fall.
Vitex agnus-castus seeds have been found in Syria at Jerf el Ahmar in layers dated between 9800 and 9300 BC, where George Willcox’s group traced changes in cereal grains as people in the early villages learned the ways of food plants. It’s impossible to guess what those settlers discovered about chaste tree berries. We know now they contain chemicals that stimulate the pituitary gland to produce female hormones, and that long before they appeared in fifth century BC Greek medical texts, they were used as contraceptives.
In the second century BC, Nikainetos described the tree as "wreathing of the Carians," implying it had been brought from Anatolia to Samos where it was used to bind the cult statue of Hera to a tree during her ritual marriage to her brother Zeus. Several hundred years later, Ovid said Athenian wives participating in the Thesmophorian festival reenacting Demeter’s wait for her daughter, Persephone’s return from the underworld prepared themselves by abstention and strewing their beds with agnos branches. Later, Pausanias reported Hera was born under the lygos tree on Samos and the statue of Artemis at the temple to Orthia Artemis in Sparta was found in a basket woven from its flexible branches.
Whatever the symbolism of associating these goddesses of procreation, Hera, Demeter and Artemis, with a plant that prevents pregnancy, the use of lygos branches suggests that in these sanctuaries, near the same latitude as my enclosed porch, people may also have been struck by the wondrousness of a deciduous shrub that’s among the first to return after the solstice, the first sign of returning life and the promise of spring.
Notes: Española is at 36E00' north latitude, Jerf el Ahmar at 36E22', Sparta at 37E4', Samos at 37E45' and Athens is at 37E94'.Axelrod, Daniel I. "Origin of Deciduous and Evergreen Habits in Temperate Forests," Evolution 20:1-15:1966, abstract available on-line.O’Brien, Joan V. The Transformation of Hera: A Study of Ritual, Hero, and the Goddess in the Iliad, 1993, discusses Nikainetos.Ovid. Metamorphoses, 8 AD, cited by "Thesmophoria," Encyclopedia Britannica, 1911.Pausanius. Description of Greece, c.143-161 AD, cited by Ioannia N. Tsoulogiannia and Demetrios A. Spandidos, "Endocrinology in Ancient Sparta," Hormones 6:80-82:2007 and by O’Brien.Riddle, John M. Contraception and Abortion from the Ancient World to the Renaissance, 1992.Willcox, George, Sandra Fornite, and Linda Herveux. "Early Holocene Cultivation Before Domestication in Northern Syria," Vegetation History and Archaeobotany 17:313-325:2008, available on-line.Wolfe, Jack A. "Late Cretaceous-Cenozoic History of Deciduousness and the Terminal Cretaceous Event," Paleobiology 13:215-226:1987, abstract available on-line._____ "Palaeobotanical Evidence for a Marked Temperature Increase Following the Cretaceous/Tertiary Boundary," Nature 343:153 - 156:11 January 1990, abstract available on-line.
Photograph: New chaste tree growth with unshed leaves and berries on enclosed porch, 24 January 2009.

Sea Pink

What’s still green: Juniper and other conifers, roses, Apache plume, honeysuckle, prickly pear, yucca, red hot poker, vinca, rock rose, sweet pea, sea pink, hollyhocks, pinks, bouncing Bess, snapdragon, golden spur columbine, Saint John’s wort, some grasses.

What’s gray, blue or gray-green: Piñon, winterfat, saltbush, buddleia, loco, snow-in-summer.

What’s red: Cholla, coral bells, beardtongues, soapworts, pink evening primrose, purple aster.

What’s blooming inside: Christmas cactus, aptenia, rochea, bougainvillea, zonal geraniums.

Animal sightings: Rounded birds with grayish bellies and red sides were around the front porch last Sunday morning; water fowl were still noisy the first part of the week when I left for work.

Weather: Remains of snow continued to shrink. Each day the dry air pulled more moisture from thawed mud that couldn’t sink into the frozen sublayer, then returned some in morning frosts on purple asters and the debris from cut weeds. Last snow 1/10/09.

Weekly update: The mere fact I planted something called sea pink in arid New Mexico tells you my command of the English language is not what it should be.

Sea pink. As in a plant that grows by the ocean, not the color of some exotic type of salmon or the aquatic tint that appears only when corals are forming. No, campion of the sea.

My plants’ Armeria pseudarmeria ancestors cling to the rocks of Capo de Roca, the westernmost bulge of Europe that protects Lisbon from the fury of the Atlantic. The better known Armeria maritima stretches form the Bay of Biscayne to the salt marshes along the coasts of England, Ireland, and the northern islands.

The genus first appeared within the leadwort family during the Miocene in Spain when grassy savannas were colonizing the world. Towards the end of that epoch, some 5.9 million years ago, the Mediterranean outlets to the Atlantic closed and the internal sea began evaporating. As it dried, temperatures and salt levels increased in the basin.

Sea pinks deployed several survival strategies, including glands on their narrow lance-like leaves that expelled salt. Andrew Hanson’s team believes Armerias also developed new ammonia compounds within their cells to stabilize threatened proteins and membranes. One, choline-o-sulfate, removed the sulphur that accompanied salt; the other, beta-alanine betaine, replaced the more common glycine betaine which diverted choline to other purposes.

When temperatures fell with the ensuing glaciers, Armerias ceased adapting. Species like maritima simply withdrew to the estuaries and Scottish mountains when forests returned. Farther south, beyond the direct reach of ice, Belén Gutiérrez Larena’s group found they drifted up and down the mountains of southeastern Spain. Splendens, filicaulis nevadensis and villosa bernisii flourish at different altitudes today on the Sierra Nevada massif.

Sea pinks transcended the shady cold in spite of themselves because nature had provided them with two different forms of female stigmas, one with rounded bumps, the other with hairy nipples. Each produces male pollen that can only fertilize the other. When one species’ peregrinations brought it into contact with another, they were able to mate, like pseudarmeria and welwitschii on the periphery of the Estoril coast or the parents of filicaulis nevadensis.

Such openness to outcrossing not only produced the natural hybrids of Iberia, but the garden varieties of giant thrift already common in 1874 when The Garden magazine warned readers if they planted Armeria varieties too near one another, they would indiscriminately fraternize, and only the rare white flowers on the globular heads would remain true. Even then, the Portuguese perennial was variously called formosa, pseudo-armeria and cephalotes and sometimes attributed to southern Europe and northern Africa.

Who knows the origin of the Joysticks I bought in 2005, grown from seed released by Kieft in 1999. Perhaps the Dutch breeders sent collectors to Portugal, perhaps they simply built on existing inventories. Javier Fuertes Aguilar found the source wouldn’t have affected the botanic ascription anyway When he and his partners tested the DNA of several Spanish species, they found the Armerias had hybridized so often individual endemic examples fit no predictable genetic pattern that a taxonomist could associate with a Linnaean label.

Perhaps I’m lucky I spaced the name. Joysticks have enough Messinian germplasm to withstand summer droughts in the rio arriba, unfazed by saline well water, and perhaps something from a more northern species as well to remain green this winter. Few would buy them if they were called Dead Sea pinks, but perhaps that would have warned the linguistically challenged.

Notes:
Aguilar, Javier Fuertes, Josep Antoni Rosselló, and Gonazlo Nieto Feliner. "Molecular Evidence for the Compilospecies Model of Reticulate Evolution in Armeria (Plumbaginaceae)," Systemic Biology 48:735-754:1999.

Gutiérrez Larena, Belén, Javier Fuertes Aguilar, and Gonzalo Nieto Feliner. "Glacial-induced Altitudinal Migrations in Armeria (Plumbaginaceae) Inferred from Patterns of Chloroplast DNA Haplotype Sharing," Molecular Ecology 11:1965-1974:2002.

Hanson, Andrew D., Bala Rathinasabapathi, Jean Rivoal, Michael Burnet, Michael O. Dillon, and Douglas A. Gage. "Osmoprotective Compounds in the Plumbaginaceae: A Natural Experiment in Metabolic Engineering of Stress Tolerance," National Academy of Science Proceedings 91:306-310:1994.

Hickey, Michael. 100 Families of Flowering Plants, 1988 second edition, describes characteristics of stigma on Armeria maritima.

JCN. "The Great Thrift," The Garden, 3 Jan 1874, published by William Robinson.

Tauleigne Gomes, Cristina and Claude Lefèbvre. "Natural Hybridisation Between Two Coastal Endemic Species of Armeria (Plumbaginaceae) from Portugal. 1. Populational in Situ Investigations," Plant Systematics and Evolution 250:215-230:2005.

Photograph: Joystick Red Shades sea pink growing in front of a retaining wall with dead grasses, 17 January 2009.

Sweet Pea

What’s still green: Juniper and other conifers, roses, Apache plume, honeysuckle, prickly pear, yucca, red hot poker, vinca, rock rose, sweet pea, sea pink, hollyhocks, pinks, bouncing Bess, snapdragon, golden spur columbine, Saint John’s wort, some grasses.

What’s gray, blue or gray-green: Piñon, winterfat, saltbush, buddleia, loco, snow-in-summer.

What’s red: Cholla, coral bells, beardtongues, soapworts, pink evening primrose, purple aster.

What’s blooming inside: Christmas cactus, aptenia, rochea, bougainvillea, zonal geraniums.

Animal sightings: Sounds of water fowl drifted up from the river yesterday morning as the sun came out after snow in the night.

Weather: Snow dustings last Sunday and Friday night; freeze and thaw between so the drive has been too muddy to drive in at night and too icy to walk out in the morning.

Weekly update: These are the times that try plant’s souls. Those whose leaves survived the killing frosts have since faced dumps of snow, then mornings below 15 degrees, and now daily freeze and thaw cycles where temperatures range between 20 and 40. Only perennials with extraordinary biochemistry can survive.

My sweet peas so far have stayed green near the base, even though leaves farther along the stems have turned to paper. Green peaks from mounds of dead leaves on vines near the village that pile on themselves in summer when there’s nothing for their tendrils to clasp.

The plants are an improbable alien in arid New Mexico. They don’t tolerate salt, they prefer a pH between 5.8 and 7.5. In their homeland, they range from Morocco and Iberia to the Balkan peninsula, then up the Danube. They quail at the deserts of Africa and Asia and haven’t scaled the Alps of Switzerland and Austria. On this continent they balk at the cold of North Dakota and the Canadian prairies, won’t grow in humid Florida, and aren’t a success in the Mexican deserts.

The rosy racemes need 14 hours of daylight, which begins here the end of April, to begin developing. If temperatures remain around 40 degrees, which they did in the mornings until the first of this past June, they take eight weeks to develop. In the best years, they come into bloom around the solstice, just as the drought season sets in.

Lathyrus latifolia needs at least 26" of rain a year. The ones that have naturalized here grow on the banks on irrigation ditches, where they keep both cool and wet. To keep mine from browning out, I dump water on them whenever the drip pan under the outside faucet fills. They stay alive with only sporadic flowers.

Then, after being babied through the summer, the yellow veined leaves surprise and stay green into winter.

Staying green means photosynthesis is continuing at some rate. For that to occur, the roots must be functioning, as must the stem. Even though the rhizomes store some nutrients, they need to extract others, including water, from the soil. In this part of New Mexico, the average frost line is 10-15". Established sweet pea roots typically reach down more than two feet, at least 9" below frozen ground.

Photosynthesis occurs in the leaves which must remain undamaged by cold temperatures which can destroy cells when the surrounding water turns to ice. Bengt Lindforss first noted evergreens in central Germany that survived the frost contained no starches, because they had converted the carbohydrates to sugar. He then established the ability of sugar to protect plants by lowering the freeze point of internal fluids.

Nikolay Maximov read his work, then injected red cabbages with some sugars (glucose, glycerol) and some alcohols to show each could increase cold defenses. Sucrose is the primary sugar in the roots of sweet peas on limestone grasslands in central Europe in summer, according to Franz Hadacek and Günther Kraus.

Polish botanists noticed sweet pea’s relatively wide, coarse pairs of leaves have large, irregularly shaped cells which would give them greater tolerance for any ice crystals that might form than smaller cells would have. They also found summer leaves contain relatively high levels of salt and calcium. If maintained all year, the first would lower the freezing point, while the second would keep cell membranes flexible enough to expand and retract with potential ice.

The leaves look the same, summer or winter, mere dark presences hiding leguminous roots that put some nitrogen in the soil. However, the external matte appearance masks their strategies for survival as completely as the snow hides their existence from the drying sun.

Notes:
Fuller, Barry J., Nick Lane, and Erica E. Benson, Life in the Frozen State, 2004, describes work of Bengt Lindforrs and Nikolay Maximov.

Hadacek, Franz and Günther F. Kraus. "Plant Root Carbohydrates Affect Growth Behaviour of Endophytic Microfungi," FEMS Microbiology Ecology 41:161-170:2002.

Kartesz, John T. "Lathyrus latifolius L.," USDA National Resource Conservation Service, National Plant Data Center.

Koike, Yasuhiko, Tomoaki Inoue, Shigetoshi Suzuki, Haruzo Higuchi. "Effect of Photoperiod on the Flowering of Lathyrus latifolius L.," Journal of the Japanese Society for Horticultural Science 69:770-772:2000.

_____ N. Kouyama, A. Yoshii, S. Suzuki, and H. Imanishi. "Effect of Low Temperatures Applied to Seeds and Seedlings on Flowering of Lathyrus latifolius L," Horticultural Research 6:525-528:2007.

Krstic, Borivoj D., Pal P. Boza, Ljiljana S. Merkulov, Lana N. Krstic, Slobodanka P. Pajevic, Zivko S. Stankovic. "Morpholigcal, Anatomical, and Physiological Characteristics of Lathyrus latifolius L. (Fabaceae)," Matica Srpska Novi Sad 103:81-89:2002, in English.

Sammis, Ted. "Frost Depth in New Mexico and the United States," New Mexico Climate 6:4-6:2008.

Photograph: Dead and green perennial sweet pea leaves in light coming through crack between fence boards, 10 January 2009.

Bougainvillea

What’s still green: Juniper and other conifers, roses, Apache plume, honeysuckle, prickly pear, yucca, red hot poker, vinca, rock rose, sweet pea, sea pink, hollyhocks, pinks, bouncing Bess, snapdragon, golden spur columbine, Saint John’s wort, some grasses.

What’s gray, blue or gray-green: Piñon, winterfat, saltbush, buddleia, loco, snow-in-summer.

What’s red: Cholla, coral bells, beardtongues, soapworts, pink evening primrose, purple aster.

What’s blooming inside: Christmas cactus, aptenia, rochea, bougainvillea, zonal geraniums.

Animal sightings: A popcorn eating mouse, come in from the cold, has been leaving droppings on the kitchen floor.

Weather: Sunny afternoons with temperatures around 40 have alternated with very cold mornings to thaw and refreeze the drive each day.

Weekly update: Houseplants on my enclosed porch have a very simple contract: in return for regular water, some occasional fertilizer and heat in the winter, they’re expected to bloom in January. The flowers don’t have to be fragrant, don’t have to be exotic, but they do have to be bright.

When the remaining snow hides from the sun in northern shadows and water collects on frozen ground or seeps through a thin veneer of soft mud, I want to look up from my desk and see color. Geranium red, bougainvillea pink. Color.

In fact, the plants don’t even have to produce flowers if they promise color. Bougainvilleas are members of the four o’clock family with tiny white, five-petaled flowers perched on wasp-waisted tubes that are attached to large, brilliant bracts that resemble reflectors placed behind candles.

In the Canary Islands, the fragrance of the flowers brings hawk moths when they first open in the evening. In the Lucknow botanical gardens, butterflies come for the nectar and transfer pollen between adjoining varieties. In South America, hummingbirds flit from plant to plant. But in Florida, where single varieties abound, the woody vines are sterile and only the color could have attracted Jim Hendry in 1927 when he began hybridizing them.

His grandmother, Julia Frierson, brought the first magenta-colored Bougainvilles glabra ‘Sanderiana’ vine from Cuba in 1875. In 1919, his Everglades Nursery gave 200 ‘Crimson Lake’ cultivars to Fort Myers, and made a second gift in 1922 when Carl Fischer was promoting a highway from the midwest to his real estate investments in Miami. Local businessmen, no doubt, were lobbying to have the road come through the town where Henry Ford wintered with Thomas Edison and Harvey Firestone.

Of course, if one were wealthy enough, one could have seen them in Rio de Janiero where Philibert Commerçon first collected them in 1768 or noticed them on the way to the casinos in Havana or found them climbing the walls of an Italian villa where their thorns warned off intruders. Most Americans in the 1920's, however, probably first saw bougainvilleas growing in Fort Myers, for the western route of the Dixie Highway did indeed pass Hendry’s showroom on its way from Chicago and Chattanooga to Miami.

The eastern route, however, is the one people would have used when I was growing up, the one that connected Detroit and Knoxville with the Soo and east coast of Florida. My first sense of winter color comes from walking by the windows of the exclusive women’s clothing store in the nearest city that featured beachwear in January. Inside, clerks reminded customers it had a convenient branch in Palm Beach.

Now I’ve personally never been to Florida, and probably saw my first bougainvillea in Phoenix in the 1980's where they’re so common the peaches and pinks of the short-day flowers were muddy and mundane. Still, I know I owe my plant to Hendry because he released ‘Barbara Karst’ around 1940 and every plant in existence must trace its heritage back to a cutting from his creation.

However, the reason I bought it has nothing to do with him or Florida, and everything to do with Fischer, who made his money manufacturing headlights. For him, cars weren’t a safe trust fund. They were about racing at the Indianapolis track he built. They were about escaping midwestern winters down a smooth, broad way south. They were about providing an alternative to Ford’s monotonous black. They were about color, brilliant bougainvillea pink.

Color.

Notes:
Hendry, Helen Johnson. "History of Bougainvillea," A. W. Kelley’s Gardens website, 2007.

Zadoo, S. N., R. P. Roy, and T. N. Khoshoo. "Cytogenetics of Cultivated Bougainvilleas II: Pollination Mechanism and Breeding System," Proceedings of the Indian National Science Academy 41: 498-5-3:1975.

Photograph: Two Barbara Karst bougainvillea buds and a flower, each attached to the central vein of a separate bract just below the base of the tube, 3 January 2009.